In many industries, we observe a paradigm shift from traditional value creation towards value co-creation and open production approaches. The boundaries of companies dissolve and many more players (suppliers, customers, users, community members, etc.) are integrated into the value creation process. Thus, a new understanding and taxonomy of value creation has to be introduced as a reference model in order to describe new phenomena based on Bottom-up economics. In this industrial context, openness as a precondition to participation, cooperation and interaction can be seen as a critical success factor. The purpose of this paper is to make a contribution to a theory of value co-creation by integrating a case observation and conceptual insights from literature that are concerned with co-creation phenomena. A value creation taxonomy is introduced as a reference model which is used to describe an ongoing paradigm shift from traditional industrial production towards Bottom-up economics. On this basis, a conceptual framework is derived for comparing how traditional value chain elements might be rearranged by organizations relying on value co-creation. The underlying research work also aims to apply the authors' framework in order to illustrate how completely new business models arise and how traditional (manufacturing) companies could be enabled to make use of value co-creation patterns for long term success.